2021

by Thomas Mortlock, Itxaso Odériz, Nobuhito Mori, Rodolfo Silva
June 8, 2021
Sea level rise isn’t the only way climate change will devastate the coast. Our research, published today, found it is also making waves more powerful, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere.
We plotted the trajectory of these stronger waves and found the coasts of South Australia and Western Australia, Pacific and Caribbean Islands, East Indonesia and Japan, and South Africa are already experiencing more (…)

by Mikael Gravers*
8 June 2021
The Myanmar military (Tatmadaw) continues its terror and arrests amid increased civilian resistance to the February 2021 coup — resistance which has included armed civilians attacking soldiers. Hospitals, education, transportation and banks are paralysed by strikes. Food and fuel shortages are looming. Meanwhile anti-coup forces have formed a National Unity Government (NUG) and drafted a federal constitution as an alternative to the 2008 military (…)

by Fredy Perlman*
I
The Egocrat — Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Kim Ii Sung — is not an accident or an aberration or an irruption of irrationality; he is a personification of the relations of the existing social order.
II
The Egocrat is initially an individual, like everyone else: mute and powerless in this society without community or communication, victimized by the spectacle, “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue, the self-portrait of power in (…)

* Origins of Corona and the Conspiracy Theorists | Kobad Ghandy
* Chronicle of deaths foretold | Ash Narain Roy
* Review of foundation document of CPI | Nityananda Ghosh
* Official Marxism in India disappearing in sync with global trend | Sankar Ray

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, June 5, 2021
India has had all the trappings of a democratic state since its independence in 1947 and from the time of its adoption of the republican constitution was adopted on January 26 1950. So democratic rights were guaranteed and there was a desire and an effort to set limits against excesses and to allow the courts independence, and permit considerable freedom of the press, freedom of association, etc. A lot of it remained on paper but there was (…)

by Kobad Ghandy
The object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. —Benedict Spinoza
So said the great philosopher 3 ½ centuries back. Today we are heading in just the opposite direction, and not just (…)

by Ash Narain Roy
The Covid-19 pandemic marks what American writer and futurist Alwin Toffler calls “the premature arrival of the future.” It has led to an unprecedented craving for the past and put a big question mark on the future. While reeling under the Covid-19 pandemic, much of humanity finds itself “alone together,” stranded as it is in what American poet Rachel Hadas calls “our shared nowhere,” politics in India is going through magical unrealism. India is witnessing a tragedy of (…)

A reveiw by Nityananda Ghosh
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COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA: FOUNDATION NOTE by Bhanudeb Dutta
(CPI Publication, Rs 20/-, Dec 2020)
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Leaderships of Communist Party of India (Marx) and, Communist Party of India have been close to each other for several years and think of moving towards unification. However, this remains on paper due to an ivory tower-mindset of their leaders. Other Left parties like Communist Party of India(Marxist-Leninist), Revolutionary Socialist Party (…)

The crisis of Marxism the world over surfaced in the late twentieth century. The fault doesn’t lie in Marx, but in so-called Marxist parties.
Extremely incorrigibly optimist sections of the concerned about the future of India’s official Marxist parties (better be termed ‘Leninist’) such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India, and variants of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) dream of comeback of those parties. The reality is that Indian Leftist (…)

24 May 2021
Recently, the Editors Guild of India condoled the deaths of journalists of over 100 news reporters, newspapers, intranet platforms and independent grassroots media persons, who have died because of Covid-19 over the past year. In April 2021 itself, more than 52 journalists died because of the virus. Many of these were brave journalists who had been reporting on the worsening pandemic and bringing to fore stories on the great human tragedy that has been unfolding before us. (…)